


without the pleasure of a scar

by viviandarkbloom



Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:51:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8173910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: Sometimes love requires the burden of proof.





	1. the day of rest

**Author's Note:**

> A stand-alone story where I'm spinning my wheels, flexing my nonexistent muscles, trying to be sexy.

_this is how you touch other women_  
 _the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter._  
 _And you searched your arms_  
 _for the missing perfume_  
  
_and knew_  
  
_what good is it_  
 _to be the lime burner’s daughter_  
 _left with no trace_  
 _as if not spoken to in the act of love_  
 _as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar._

—Michael Ondaatje, from “The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife”

 

Sundays, she says.

That day suits her best, she tells Gillian. It’s the only day where she can escape family, errands, responsibilities, duties, all the modern millstones bright and burdensome around her lovely neck. She does have a lovely neck, Gillian thinks, and at the moment it is a territory of pink: a postcoital blush tinges the scattered freckles and the carotid artery, rises along the muscular swell of her throat, and perishes in the shallow dusk of a collarbone.

They are in the barn on a pile of blankets, on a bed of straw, enacting a timeless yet modern upgrade on the tableau of shepherd and pastoral maid. Andrew Marvell would be proud. Or not, as the case may be. Rain rumbles the roof and scores silver into the sky and trees and mud. She never thought Caroline would deign to getting fucked in a barn, but stranger things have happened. That she ever became Gillian’s lover, for one thing. Perhaps _lover_ is too romantic a designation for what they do but the word fills her mouth like cabernet, so thick and heady she wants it on her tongue forever and in the same instance rolling through her belly and blood, her body an eternal cupbearer for the word and the woman.

Her shirt, crumpled under Caroline’s head, functions as a pillow and a wool blanket scratches at her bare shoulders. Under the blanket they are both in various states of undress but she is inside Caroline, fingers curling and grasping for the elusive. Not that it’s difficult to get her off; the trick is following the twist of the terrain inside her, to travel blind. Know the language of her breathing, the rhythm of her hips, the nip of her teeth, the taste of her skin. The impalpable art of fucking means chasing her desire through your own, rendered empty and sated all at once.

She is close now, and Gillian knows this because Caroline’s hand is at her back, gripping a belt loop on her jeans and gravitating toward a prominent scar an inch or so above the waistband. She strokes the scar with her fingertips. Gillian’s never actually seen the scar, never bothered to gaze upon it by contorting herself in any way or angling with a mirror, as if she’s some piss-poor Hindu goddess or some baby feminist who’s just read _Our Bodies, Ourselves._ It’s enough that she feels it; on rainy days it tightens around her like a bandage and she remembers the knife digging into her. Touched as a talisman, the scar perennially renews itself as a wound. How many times has she gone to bed with some idiot who’s said, _hey, you have a scar there._ As if she didn’t fucking know. Then: _Where’d you get it?_ As if she’d fucking tell anyone.

Of course, Caroline doesn’t need to be told. Gillian likes to think that even if Caroline didn’t know particulars about Eddie she would not ask, that somehow she would know through touch alone. Her touch alone is more discerning than any question; as routinely unnerved as Gillian is to have someone pay such categorically thorough attention to her body, she always submits to Caroline’s silent interrogations.

 _Closer._ She moves faster, slower, faster, falls into the right rhythm as dictated by Caroline’s hips, and then— _here_ —touches sweet familiar territory, slick and pebbly, warm and narrow, at the perfect moment. Gillian’s bowed head bestows a sheath of hair over Caroline’s face—eyes tightly shut, mouth open and sensually slack as she cries out, coming for the second time today.

“Look at me,” Gillian says.

There it is, the blue flame that warms her.

Gillian grins. Afterwards she pulls out slowly and her hand remains sticky and snug between Caroline’s thighs. She watches the warm pink flush sweep wild across Caroline’s skin and her lips follow the path of conquest down into the valley of the breasts and _I will fear no evil._ If they are choosing God’s day of rest to shag on a regular basis, well, might as well go all in with the blasphemy.

“Sundays it is, then.”

 


	2. more than the moon

There are written histories in Gillian’s head. A compendium of quick heated glances and lingering touches, backstories of spouses and objects of desire, children and parents, all of it too dangerously complicated for quick assessment and too finely detailed to let go, at least not now, not under these circumstances. So many histories layered through her mind that it’s actually a library of wanting and wishes, with a tiny section on love in all its disguises, jests, and variations: _How to Stupidly Fall in Love with Your Bitch of a Stepsister. The Perfections of Pain and Pleasure. Scars and You: Perfect Together._ Like all libraries it’s never complete, the thirst for acquisition never slaked. But if she’s the librarian tending this fucked-up collection, then she’s the world’s worst librarian because in the midst of all this teeming disarray she’d like to commit the worst bibliographic sin imaginable: rip pages from a grimoire of secret wishes and cast a spell. She wants to immerse herself wholly in heretical prognostications diametrically opposed and loosened from the lynchpin of common sense: She wants alchemy, the dangerous, irrational, and alluring bastard relation of Caroline’s beloved chemistry.

She got her wish the night of Raff’s birthday party—insofar as any tiny, informal gathering in her home could be called a party because she hated having too many people in it, even if it was mostly family. She enjoyed living on her own, perhaps too much so. After nearly a year of the emotional hair shirt that constituted her marriage to Robbie, she had finally kicked him out. Then Raff moved out as well; not because of her, thank Christ, but rather like the rest of the world he was doomed to commit romantic mistakes of his own. 

  
That night Caroline was there, of course. Glorious, sulking, and drinking too much. A widow for nearly two years. During that time she wore grief well, a striking accessory to her emotional appearance: A crown of thorns. Frequently Gillian reversed the phrase in her mind, like in the Echo and the Bunnymen song: Thorn of crowns. Just as exquisite and painful. Even in the moments when Gillian glimpsed the woman that she knew before this loss there was always the inevitable moment, a pause in a conversation or a moment at a traffic light—or in the happy muddle of a family get together as it was that night, voices overlapping into Babylonian murmurs—when Caroline’s eyes would become slightly unfocused and faraway, and Gillian knew that she was communing with the dead. She would then wonder if there was ever any competing with that and, for all her wanting and longing, the very thought would trip her headfirst into a prolonged abyss of self-loathing.   
  


But Caroline had come straight to the party from work, outclassing them all in a dark suit, pencil skirt, and heels, and whatever equilibrium Gillian possessed for the moment went right down the shitter. After dinner and cake Caroline drifted away from the group at the table and stood by the fire, claiming she was chilly, and nursed that faraway look in her eyes more than she did her drink—despite a sour look from her mother, she downed a glimmering bellyful of sauvignon blanc in one impressive gulp.   
  


Gillian too ran under false pretenses. She knelt by the fire that required no tending and savagely skewered a burning log with a poker. The great black log cracked open, revealing a vermillion heart spewing sparks and as she reveled in its sudden heat, she stole covert longing looks at Caroline’s legs. She nodded at the empty wineglass. “That’s your third.”  
  


“Didn’t know you were counting.” Caroline’s elegant hand cradled the glass and the stem flared out from between her fingers as a weapon, as if she were ready and happily game to spar against Gillian and her mighty poker—and completely assured of victory in the process. “Not sure if I should drive home.”  
  


Would it be too much, Gillian thought, to skewer my heart out of my chest and offer it to you now? Fortunately for all concerned, in the field of unrequited romance Gillian was more the silently-pine-brood-and-die type rather than the melodramatic-gesture-with-blood-and-vital-organs type. “That so?”   
  


Caroline hummed. “Do you know there’s a harvest moon tonight?”  
  


“Yeah, of course,” Gillian lied, because it seemed quite bad form to be a farmer and not know these things.   
  


“Think it would be nice—” Caroline alternately tapped and caressed the tip of the empty wineglass against her lips. “—to see it here, out in the country.”   
  


Gillian dropped the poker. It clattered loudly on the flagstones in front of the fireplace and everyone stared at her.   
  


“Don’t you think?” Caroline insisted. No mistaking the intent of her tone, Gillian thought, nor the bold blue of her eyes.   
  


“No,” Gillian replied hoarsely. “I don’t think.”   
  


“Well, Gillian. That’s what I like about you. You’re a woman of instinct.” Caroline’s hand furled around her bicep and squeezed, and simultaneously Gillian’s eyelids fluttered, her stomach dropped, her cunt ached, and a very tiny section of her mind, a Liechtenstein-sized microstate of common sense in proportion to the European-style chaos of the whole, said, _this is probably a bad idea._

 _  
_By the time this minute mental protest was lodged, Caroline had already strutted across the room, conned Gary into driving the old people home, poured another glass of wine, charmed the birthday boy more than necessary, and Bob’s your uncle. An hour later they were alone and Gillian had the door wide open on the pretext of viewing the ridiculously big and bright moon—so viably close she believed she could see pockmarks and scars, not shadows and tricks—but more in hope that the chill autumn night would cool her blood. But as the night was undone by insensate lunar tides, so was she.

  
In kicking off her heels, opening another bottle of wine, and liberating another button on her blouse, Caroline richly rivaled this potency. She stood beside Gillian in the doorway, barefoot and grasping the wine bottle by the neck with the killer confidence of a hunter clutching a brace of grouse. 

  
And I am next on the hunt, Gillian thought. She nodded at the bottle. “You really need all that, just to—be here?” She stumbled over words. “To be with me?”  
  


“On the contrary.” Caroline took a generous swig. “I’ve needed it to stay away from you. Problem is I’ve built up a tolerance now, you see. Nothing works anyone. So here I am, drunk and at your door. Wanting you more than the moon.”    
  


Gillian dared not look at her and studiously glared at the moon and its icy, frayed halo. “Sounds almost romantic.”   
  


“You don’t trust that,” Caroline said. “You don’t trust me.”   
  


She sounded so genuinely aggrieved that Gillian laughed.  
  


“What’s so funny?”  
  


“You’re like a wolf dodging bullets at the gate of a sheep pen—‘oh dear, I don’t understand why suddenly everyone’s shooting at me, I’m perfectly harmless.’”   
  


“I am perfectly harmless, and you needn’t shoot at me,” Caroline retorted primly, as if getting shot were actually an option here. Gillian did have an empty shotgun in the barn, the only memento left of her marriage as well as a pertinent reminder that she was lucky Eddie didn’t blow off her head with the bloody thing. She survived. Amazing, but she survived him. The question of surviving Caroline Elliot, however, remained.   
  


“Perfectly fucking harmless.” Gillian idly kicked at the doorframe with her foot. “I’m scared to death of you.” Now she wanted to kick herself for blurting that out.   
  


“Nonsense. Why?”  
  


You know why, she wanted to say, but instead admitted another truth. “Well, it’s funny, how it is. When you get so close to something you’ve wanted for so long, and then suddenly you’re all afraid. Almost like you don’t want it anymore.”   
  


She knew that Caroline would immediately counteract that statement with a kiss. She also knew that Caroline would be a good kisser; it made perfect masochistic sense. So here she was, opening her mouth and letting the wolf in, tasting the night and the moon, the euphoria of _at last_ and the dismay of _she’s too fucking good at kissing alone, oh Christ oh Christ I am doomed,_ all of it a veritable feast upon her tongue. Caroline touched the edge of her shirtsleeve, her thumbnail scraped at Gillian’s wrist, an insistent claim on skin. She pressed Gillian into the doorframe and held Gillian’s lip in her mouth gently as if it were a rare delicacy, a perfect balance of sweet and salt, before biting into it deep enough that the pain reverberated with pleasure and Gillian couldn’t tell if there was now spit or blood upon her lips and honestly didn’t care. She had shed blood for far less than this and if blood were a necessary element of their alchemy, so be it. Together they stumbled in the doorway, enacting half-drunk, half-assed mating rituals—seizing a handful of hair, untucking a blouse, thrusting a thigh between two legs, all of it around furiously messy kissing—that, while hardly unique to Yorkshire, indelibly marked its regional character. But an insurmountable barrage of soft pleasure, of kisses along her jaw and her throat, countered this as Gillian’s mind raced around a loop: _You want and you want and you want until the wanting is the only thing._

 __  
Her fist tangled in Caroline’s expensive blouse and she wanted nothing more than to continue the kiss until her lips were raw but the sound of the wine bottle shattering on the doorstep after slipping out of Caroline’s slackened grip broke the spell.  
  


Barefoot, Caroline leapt back from the pool of glittering shards and cheap red. “Oh shit,” she said, breathless. “I’m so sorry.”  
  


She would, of course, apologize so sincerely over something so meaningless.  
  


“Well, lucky I don’t fancy merlot that much.” Gillian pushed her inside and kicked shut the door. Fuck the moon, she thought, and let the broken bleeding wine bottle serve as a punishing doormat for anyone unfortunate enough to show up at her home at this most inopportune time.   
  


They didn’t make it to the bedroom; the broad old couch sufficed quite nicely. She wanted to go slow but couldn’t: She had not only her own clothes but Caroline’s as well removed in record time—despite an admonition to “be careful with the stockings”—and wanted to come only minutes after Caroline slipped a hand between her legs but didn’t because she was fucked with tantalizing slowness while holding tight to the armrest of couch, her body bound up with limbs and breath, cradled in heat and movement, sheltered and torn apart. Later in firelight they lay together, sweaty and tangled. She raked Caroline’s hair with a hand and stared intently at the smooth, sloping range of her shoulder blade. She relished the sweet satisfied damp between her own legs and, with every shaky breath, quietly chased after the frenetic rhythm of her heart. Then she tapped the rocky path of Caroline’s spine, the vertebrae shifting under her persistent fingertips with each sigh and movement and that reminded her of times when she would cautiously navigate a stony path through a shallow riverbed, waiting to take the wrong step, waiting for the soaking inevitable fall. Touch—the most unreliable of senses because it does not document disappearance with quite the same rigor as the others. Sometimes the things you touch never seem real.

  
“What do you want?” She tossed the broad question out there, hoped for answers equally grand from I want to make love all night long to I want you to be mine, but should have expected exactly what she heard.  
  


“More wine,” Caroline mumbled.   
  


“No.” Disappointed, Gillian decided to hone in on specifics. “What do you want me to do to you?”  
  


“I want you on your knees.” She stretched, kissed Gillian once gently, then firmly, before a third time that lingered and consumed in delirious equal measure. “Can you figure it out from there?”  
  


She pushed her hand between Caroline’s legs and cupped her; public hair nestled against the heel of her hand, her fingers swiped at the sheltered, wet crevasse she found there. Caroline released a warm hiss reminiscent of a violin string’s exhalation caught indelibly on an old record.   
  


“I’ve been with women before,” Gillian said. “I know what I’m doing.”   
  


“You don’t know,” Caroline retorted shakily, “how ecstatic I am to hear that.”   
  


“And you don’t know how lucky you are,” Gillian whispered into her ear. “Because I don’t get on my knees for just anyone anymore.”   
  


It was not that she found the position completely subservient; she knew the elisions and reversals of power very well, and always thrilled as it surged through her veins. Nor that she had arthritis in her knees, although she did curse the threadbare rug running under the couch that provided little in the way of comfort to those bloody aching joints. This was a gift to herself, a rediscovery of patience and memory, the opening of a hermeticum that would provide the crucial alchemical formula that would grant her—what? Love? Yes, she thought, admit it to yourself, at least. She kissed and nipped the soft interior of Caroline’s thighs and the entirety of her cunt lay swollen, delicate, and ready against Gillian’s mouth. As it usually did, this act felt like graceful immersion into the sea. 

  
The first time Gillian swam in the sea, she was a child on holiday with her parents. Predictably she was overexcited and went out too far, but luckily was swallowed up and borne back toward the shore by a huge wave. The memory of the wave collapsing blissfully over her body remained a sacred joy within her. She never told anyone about it, about the emotions it elicited, because she was certain no one would understand; this belief firmly predicated upon witnessing her mother as a sobbing, relieved wreck as she had miraculously waddled, grinning and unscathed, out of the sea. This was not the same thing—far from it—but those seamlessly blended sensations of terror and safety, euphoria and finality, that she had sought in so many experiences and with so many people found not replication or explanation here, but satisfying recognition.

    
It was very fucking strange to get philosophical when you go down on someone. Perhaps it somehow enhanced her performance, because Caroline said her name and _oh God_ several times, mingled together in such a beautifully broken way like the startling high notes in the song of a shattered teacup.   
  


Afterward they lay in an awkward, uncomfortable heap on the couch and still Gillian could not stop touching her. Unreliable bodies, unreliable narrators. Her fingers traced Caroline’s flushed cheek, parted lips, shadowed jawline. “You’re amazing. And beautiful,” she said.

  
Content as a house cat, Caroline sighed. “And you’re better at that than I thought you’d be.”


End file.
